|
Philip Roth - From the Aging category:
- Everyman...
Old age isn't a battle: old age is a massacre. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Artists category:
Nothing has a more sinister effect on art than the artist's desire to prove that he's good. The terrible temptation of idealism! (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Books category:
Everybody else is working to change, persuade, tempt and control them. The best readers come to fiction to be free of all that noise. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Chaos category:
I'm interested in what people do with the chaos in their lives and how they respond to it, and simultaneously what they do with what they feel like are limitations. If they push against these limitations, will they wind up in the realm of chaos, or will they push against limitations and wind up in the world of freedom? (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Confession category:
- Operation Shylock: A Confession...
Everything dictated silence and self-control but I couldn't restrain myself and spoke my mind. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Editing category:
- Ghost Writer...
I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Frustration category:
I know I'm not going to write as well as I used to. I no longer have the stamina to endure the frustration. Writing is frustration - it's daily frustration, not to mention humiliation. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Generosity category:
It's best to give while your hand is still warm. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Idealism category:
You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Knowledge category:
All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Life category:
-The Professor Of Desire...
How easy life is when it's easy, and how hard when it's hard. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Life category:
-American Pastoral...
Life is just a short period of time in which you are alive. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Mirrors category:
- My Life as a Man...
He is not simply looking into the mirror because he is transfixed by what he sees. Rather, the artist's success depends as much as anything on his powers of detachment, on de-narcissizing himself... (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Movement category:
- American Pastoral...
I was a biography in constant motion, memory to the marrow of my bones. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Problems category:
Literature got me into this mess and literature is going to have to get me out of it. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Questions category:
I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care. Joyce Carol Oates says somewhere that when writers ask each other what time they start working and when they finish and how much time they take for lunch, they're actually trying to find out, 'Is he as crazy as I am?' I don't need that question answered. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Revelation category:
It's human to have a secret, but it's just as human to reveal it sooner or later. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Silence category:
Literature takes a habit of mind that has disappeared. It requires silence, some form of isolation, and sustained concentration in the presence of an enigmatic thing. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Suffering category:
It's amazing how much punishment we can take. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Taste category:
-The Dying Animal...
You tasted it. Isn't that enough? Of what do you ever get more than a taste? That's all we're given in life, that's all we're given of life. A taste. There is no more. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Tradition category:
Everyone becomes a part of history whether they like it or not and whether they know it or not. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Work category:
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Worry category:
- The Dying Animal...
Stop worrying about growing old. And think about growing up. (Philip Roth)
Philip Roth - From the Writing category:
Writing turns you into somebody who's always wrong. The illusion that you may get it right someday is the perversity that draws you on. What else could? As pathological phenomena go, it doesn't completely wreck your life. (Philip Roth)
| 
